The German industrial giant Ferrostaal will use solar technology from the California startup eSolar in power plants to be built in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa.

The partnership, announced on Thursday, comes a month after eSolar, which is backed by Google and other investors, signed an agreement with a Chinese industrial company to build solar power plants that would generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity.

Last year, eSolar agreed to license its technology to an Indian developer that plans to build solar projects with a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts.

Bill Gross, eSolar’s founder and chairman, said the Ferrostaal agreement continues the startup’s strategy of striking deals with deep-pocketed partners who can bankroll multibillion-dollar solar farms at a time when credit remains tight.

“They have access to capital and they have enough of a balance sheet that they can put a guarantee on a plant that a bank will trust and come up with the money,” said Mr. Gross in an interview. “We’re looking for partners all over that have that kind of strength to make these plants go forward.”

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Environmental organizations that belong to the U.S. Climate Action Partnership are downplaying the departure this week of BP, Caterpillar and ConocoPhillips, saying the high-profile alliance will continue to make its presence felt as lawmakers fine-tune the climate change bills in the House and the Senate.

BP and ConocoPhillips made “tactical” decisions to opt out in order to pursue more advantageous terms in the final version of the legislation, said Tony Kreindler, director of communications for the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the member groups. “It shows that now we’re getting down to the brass tacks on these bills.”

Other environmental advocates agree. “In some ways, it’s a sign that people are still taking very seriously the likelihood that the legislation will move,” said Daniel Lashof, the director of the climate center of Natural Resources Defense Council, another member of the Climate Action Partnership.

In an e-mail message, Eric Haxthausen, director of United States climate policy for the Nature Conservancy, also pointed to continuing efforts by diverse groups to maintain the pressure on lawmakers. “Last month, the Conservancy and other U.S.C.A.P. members joined nearly 100 business, labor, faith-based and environmental groups that ran ads calling for climate and clean energy legislation,” Mr. Haxthausen said.

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The Associated Press California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, left, and United States Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar congratulate each other on Thursday at the signing of a historic agreement to remove four hydroelectric dams from the Klamath River.

Four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and Northern California will be removed under an agreement that ends decades of fighting between fishermen, farmers, environmental and Native American groups over water and fishing rights.

On Thursday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the chief executive of the utility PacifiCorp, Greg Abel, and three Native American tribes inked two agreements outlining the dismantling of the dams, the restoration of 350 miles of the Klamath River and water-sharing rights between farms and fish.

“The Klamath River, which for years was synonymous with controversy, is now a stunning example of how cooperation and partnership can resolve difficult conflicts,” said Mr. Salazar in a statement.

The Klamath River has been the site of intense fighting between farmers for more water and fishermen for improved fishing rights. In 2001, irrigation water was turned off to save salmon during a drought. When the water was restored, thousands of salmon died. Critics contend that the dams block salmon and promote disease because they raise the water temperature.

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Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, filed a petition Tuesday asking the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its finding that global warming poses a threat to people.

Mr. Cuccinelli, seeking to block the decision, also filed a petition with a federal appeals court for a review of the December E.P.A. finding, in which the agency asserted that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases emitted from automobiles, power plants and factories “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people.”

In part, the move was aimed at encouraging Congress to enact legislation to manage the distribution of these gases into the atmosphere — essentially telling lawmakers, as John Broder reported late last year, that if they do not act to control greenhouse gas pollution, the E.P.A. would “use its rule-making power to do so.”

Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Cuccinelli called the E.P.A.’s finding “an incredibly far-reaching decision” arising from what he called uncertain data and a “flawed process.”

“The potential impact of the finding on Virginia agriculture, the energy industry, manufacturing jobs, and in truth the cost of living for every single Virginian,” Mr. Cuccinelli said, “would create a staggering burden.”

Mr. Cuccinelli also added that the E.P.A. should consider new information, including recently publicized e-mail messages from a British climate research institute. Mr. Cuccinelli said the e-mail messages showed scientists using faulty data to support the notion of manmade global warming.

He also referenced the work of the International Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body charged with assessing climate research, which has come under criticism from climate change skeptics for what they say has been sloppy science and, in some instances, conflicts of interest among panel members.

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The European Wind Energy Association examined current forecasts from E.U. members on their established goals for using renewable energy sources. The complete table is here.

The European Union as a whole will meet its goal of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020, according to an analysis by the European Wind Energy Association — though some individual countries will fall short of their individual production targets, while others now report they will exceed them.

The report, which is based on each country’s most recent forecast, suggests that 13 member states expect to meet their goals, while eight countries say they will go beyond their benchmarks.

“In 2008, many countries were stating that their target would be difficult to meet,” Justin Wilkes, the policy director for the association, said in a news release. “Now the majority are forecasting that they will meet or exceed their national target.”

The forecast documents give a clear signal to the European Commission of where it could facilitate implementation of the Renewable Energy Directive, Wilkes said.

Six of the E.U.’s 27 member states say they will not be able to reach the goal of 20 percent renewable energy in 10 years. Those members include Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Bulgaria and — perhaps most notably, Denmark. That country already has one of the highest percentages of renewable power in its energy portfolio, but it nonetheless expects to fall short of its goal of 30 percent by 2020.

All six countries, however, say that they expect to be within 1 percent of their targets by the deadline.

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The video above was released by the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate — a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts that, according to its Web site, “brings together science and military experts to examine new strategies for combating climate change, protecting our national security, increasing our energy independence and preserving our nation’s natural resources.”

The project was formed last summer when former Senator John Warner, a Virginia Republican, joined the Pew Environment Group in an effort to “share with the public viewpoints on the critical links between national security, energy and global warming.”

“Climate Patriots,” as the five-minute presentation is called, is the project’s latest foray in that effort.

“Climate change affects the sons and daughters who are currently stepping up to wear the uniform of our country,” Mr. Warner says in the video. “They may be called upon to perform missions which are a consequence of an erratic climate change or shortage of energy or a variety of both.”

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Michael Kamber for The New York Times Nigerian children are lit by the nighttime glow of gas flares at a refinery. Environmental groups are concerned about the practice increasing in Uganda, as oil production ramps up there.

Environmental advocates are expressing concern over the potential impact of oil discoveries in western Uganda’s Lake Albert region, thought to total as much as 1.7 billion barrels.

Most recently, documents made public by Platform, a British environmental and human rights organization working in Uganda, appeared to reveal an agreement between the British oil exploration company Tullow Oil and the Ugandan government to allow gas flaring.

Often viewing it as a waste product, oil companies have traditionally flared, or burned, the combustible gases — chiefly methane — that arise from the production process. But critics of the practice have increasingly identified flaring as a major source of greenhouse gas production, and one that could be avoided by using the gas for other purposes.

“Production is going to start in 2010 with no environmental assessment having yet been carried out,” said Platform’s researcher in Uganda, Taimour Lay. “Once we move to major production, the legal rights given to the companies to flare gas will lead to pollution, carbon emissions and local conflict, as has happened in Nigeria.” Mr. Lay added, “Under these Ugandan contracts, the government won’t even have the right to ask them to stop flaring.”

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EPA Nuclear energy is the utility industry’s preferred “environmentally friendly” technology, followed by wind power and natural gas, a new survey found.

American utility industry executives see nuclear energy as the most promising carbon-free power source, are skeptical of climate change science, and are uncertain about the future, according to a report to be issued Thursday by Black & Veatch, the engineering and consulting giant.

The survey of 329 executives, managers and engineers, which Black & Veatch shared with The New York Times, comes as the utility industry faces slow growth in energy consumption and a two-year fall in capital spending, the first such decline since the Great Depression.

“The industry is facing a lot of demands to spend more money to fix up an aging infrastructure, build smart grids and deal with cybersecurity while cutting carbon emissions,” said Bill Kemp, a Black & Veatch vice president, in an interview. “In the near term, we’ll have a difficult economic environment and a slow sales growth as regulators are reluctant to push through large rate increases while voters are still in pain.”

The stalled emissions trading legislation in Congress has added to the confusion about the future shape of the electricity market, Black & Veatch found. Despite a prominent campaign by some utility executives to support an emissions trading market, more than 70 percent of the industry insiders surveyed oppose the current legislation and 52 percent said the United States cannot afford the proposal to cap greenhouse gas emissions.

More than 75 percent think there is a future for coal-fired power plants.

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Shutterstock

1) Injecting tiny proteins into the hunt for clean coal.

2) Energy companies are on the prowl for mergers and acquisitions.

3) Energy-scavenging nanofibers from the University of California, Berkeley?

4) British Airways enters the bio-based fuel production market.

5) Ford wants to begin greening its dealerships.

Three influential multinational corporations have decamped from the United States Climate Action Partnership, a 3-year-old lobbying group. They cited mounting concerns over the direction of climate change legislation, particularly concessions to the politically influential coal sector.

In separate statements, BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar all announced they were discontinuing their membership in the group, which includes chief executives from several corporate giants as well as influential environmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund.

“All three companies have provided invaluable assistance, expertise and significant commitments of time and resources in U.S.C.A.P.’s efforts to advance comprehensive climate and energy legislation,” the organization said in a statement that played down the departures.

But Ronnie Chappell, a BP spokesman, told Green Inc. that the company felt it could do more to influence the outcome of pending House and Senate legislation on its own. “Our views are that there are segments of the economy that are largely untouched or aren’t carrying as big a piece of the burden that they might,” Mr. Chappell said, referencing the coal sector.

The company says that American legislators are missing an opportunity to provide more incentives to spur natural gas production. “That doesn’t make sense to us,” Mr. Chappell said.

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Susana Raab for The New York Times Two enzyme makers say they’ve driven down the costs for converting materials like switchgrass into fuel.

Two of the world’s leading companies in the enzyme business, Novozymes and Danisco of Denmark, announced this week that they had found a way to produce enzymes that could reliably and affordably convert agricultural waste into so-called cellulosic ethanol.

The term cellulosic ethanol is a reference to cellulose, an energy-rich molecule in plants that scientists say can be converted to fuel. The term was coined to contrast this type of fuel with ethanol made from the simpler starch molecule in grains like corn. The developments at Novozymes and Danisco are being touted by the companies as a way to avoid using food feedstocks like corn in the creation of plant-based fuels.

Both companies are presenting the news at a biofuel conference in Orlando, Fla.

“We have been working on this for the past 10 years and promised our customers and the market to be ready by 2010,” Steen Riisgaard, the chief executive of Novozymes, said in a news release. “I’m extremely pleased to announce that we’re ready. The enzymes are ready. Biofuel producers now have a critical component to turn agricultural waste into a competitive alternative to gasoline.”

Many companies have been working on a variety of feed stocks and techniques to produce cellulosic ethanol around the world, including in China, Britain and the United States — but scaling up to an economically viable production model has been difficult to achieve.

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times The San Francisco Bay area is already a center of the nascent battery-charged economy.

In Monday’s New York Times, Clifford Krauss and I wrote about the ways cities are preparing for the rollout of electric cars later year. West Coast cities like Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles; and San Diego are vying to become electric car capitals.

But the San Francisco Bay Area is already a center of the nascent battery-charged economy, thanks to a concentration of Silicon Valley electric car infrastructure startups, as well as companies like Google and Pacific Gas and Electric that are eager for a carbon-free future.

You can see that future taking shape on the highways and byways of the Bay Area, where Tesla Motors has sold 150 of its $109,000 electric Roadsters. I spotted at least one of the super-fast sports cars silently zooming through traffic every time I drove through the Valley, saw a baby blue model rocketing up a steep hill near my home in Berkeley and caught another Roadster effortlessly negotiating the twisting coastal road in Marin County at high speed.

(Bay Area boosters may be dismayed to learn, though, that Tesla has sold twice as many Roadsters in Los Angeles.)

Before Richard Lowenthal jumps into his electric Mini Cooper to drive from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, he pulls out his smartphone and checks on the availability of charging stations made by his company, Coulomb Technologies. City-owned garages around San Francisco sport old-style charging stations from the “Who Killed the Electric Car” era.

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European Pressphoto Agency Samsung’s first commercial solar plant in South Korea. The company’s American arm is expected to provide panels for plants in California.

Samsung, the Japanese South Korean conglomerate best known to Americans for its televisions and cellphones, is jumping into the American solar business.

Pacific Gas and Electric, the California utility serving much of the northern and central parts of the state, asked regulators last week to approve a series of 25-year contracts [pdf] for 130 megawatts’ worth of photovoltaic power plants to be built by Solar Project Solutions, a joint venture between Samsung America and ENCO Utility Services, a former subsidiary of the utility company Edison International.

The deal is the latest of a spate of such agreements signed by California utilities as they take advantage of the increasing attractiveness of photovoltaic power as the price of solar modules falls and new competitors enter the market.

Unlike large solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to heat liquids to generate steam to run electricity-generating turbines, photovoltaic farms can be built relatively quickly near cities and existing transmission lines.

The Samsung venture will construct a 50-megawatt power plant and three 20-megawatt solar farms in Tulare County in California’s Central Valley. A fourth 20-megawatt power plant will be built in neighboring Kings County.

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G.W.E.C. “Wind power has become the power technology of choice,” said Steve Sawyer, head of the Global Wind Energy Council.

The Global Wind Energy Council, a trade association based in Brussels, estimates that wind power capacity grew by 31 percent worldwide in 2009, with 37.5 additional gigawatts installed, bringing global wind power capacity to 157.9 gigawatts.

China accounted for a third of the new capacity, and the Chinese market experienced more than 100 percent growth.

According to the trade group, more than 500,000 people are now employed by the wind power industry around the world, and the market for wind turbine installations last year was worth about $63 billion. The primary markets today are in Asia, Europe and North America.

“The continued rapid growth of wind power despite the financial crisis and economic downturn is testament to the inherent attractiveness of the technology, which is clean, reliable and quick to install,” said Steve Sawyer, the secretary general of the council, in a statement issued late last week. “Wind power has become the power technology of choice a growing number of countries around the world.”

The market in the United States grew by 39 percent with nearly 10 gigawatts of new capacity installed in 2009. The total installed and grid-connected capacity in the United States is now about 35 gigawatts, according to the trade group’s assessment.

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Entech David Gelbaum

When the news emerged in December that David Gelbaum, the wealthy former hedge fund manager, conservationist and philanthropist, had suspended his annual $20 million bequest to the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as high-dollar contributions to other organizations, a shudder ran through the renewable energy world.

Mr. Gelbaum, after all, is one of the country’s largest private investors in green technology, and the Quercus Trust, his family fund, has approximately $400 million parked in more than 40 green technology firms.

Speculation that Mr. Gelbaum’s green technology investments might be next to suffer quickly sprang up online. “David Gelbaum Cuts Donations – Bye-Bye, Greentech Plays?” read a recent headline on Earth2Tech.com, a green energy blog.

In an interview this week, the famously reclusive investor first pushed back against conjecture that financial setbacks had left his empire teetering.

“I’m not broke,” he said. “I’m just not in a liquid business any more. It was not a question of a lack of wealth, it was a question of lack of liquidity.”

As for his clean tech portfolio, Mr. Gelbaum said it has yet to turn a profit. “I’m in the red,” he said, adding that recession and credit crisis of the last two years had been challenging. “It’s been pretty bloody,” he said. “If you’re a pre-revenue clean-tech company, good luck in finding somebody to invest in you.”

But when it comes to his own clean-tech investments, Mr. Gelbaum said he was not going anywhere. “I’m very bullish on solar,” he said. “I think that solar and the smart grid have huge short-term potential.”

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